What to eat before a tennis match when nobody knows when it starts

The order of play says you are third on Court 12, not before 1 pm. You do the arithmetic everyone does and eat at 10. Then the first match goes to a third set. The second one runs long. You walk on at 4:40 in the afternoon, 6 hours after your last real meal, and the first thing your legs tell you in the second set is that you fuelled for a different day.

Every piece of tennis nutrition advice starts from a number: eat 3 hours before the match. That number is correct and almost useless, because it assumes you know when the match starts. On an outside court at a tournament, you do not.

I spent the 2026 US Open working in the player dining room. What happens in there on a delay day is a timing problem that nobody has written down properly, more than a nutrition problem in the textbook sense, and the players who handle it well eat much the same food as the ones who handle it badly, on a different structure.

Why the 3-hour rule breaks

The rule exists for a real reason. A pre-competition meal of 1 to 4 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body mass, taken 1 to 4 hours out, tops up liver glycogen and leaves the stomach largely clear by the time you start. Take the same meal 30 minutes before the first serve and you play with a full gut. Take it 6 hours before and liver glycogen has been declining the whole time you sat in the locker room, so less of what that meal delivered is still there when you walk on. The loss over 3 extra hours at rest is modest, and it still works against you rather than for you.

So the standard advice has a hidden assumption: one meal, one start time, one shot at getting it right.

Delay breaks the assumption in a way that cannot be fixed by moving the meal, because you only find out you were wrong after the fact. By the time the schedule has slipped 3 hours, the meal is already digested. And you cannot simply eat another one. A second full meal at 3 pm for a match that might start at 3:40 puts you on court with food in your stomach, and if the delay extends again you are now on your third meal of the afternoon.

The structure that works

Split the job in two. One meal that you time, and a feed that you repeat.

The meal is timed off the earliest realistic start, not the scheduled one. If the order of play says not before 1 pm and you are third on, the earliest realistic start is around 1 pm and the latest is anyone's guess. Eat your anchor meal 3 hours before the earliest, so around 10 am. That protects the case where everything runs to time, which is the only case where being wrong is unrecoverable.

Then you hold, by feeding in small repeated amounts that carry no gastric penalty, where most players simply wait. Something in the region of 20 to 40 g of carbohydrate every 45 to 60 minutes from the point the anchor meal has cleared, in a form that leaves the stomach quickly: a banana, a sports drink, a gel, or a small handful of dried fruit. A sandwich is too much.

That figure is borrowed rather than proven. It comes from the guidance for eating during prolonged exercise, where 30 to 60 g an hour is standard, and nobody has run the trials on sitting in a corridor waiting to play. At rest you are burning less and emptying more slowly, so the lower end is the sensible place to start and the number is a working figure rather than a validated dose. Find yours in training.

The anchor meal worked out by body mass, at 1, 2 and 3 g per kilogram, is tabulated in the Tennis Competition Guide along with the rest of the tournament week.

What to hold with

Liquid empties faster than solid, and lower fat and fibre empty faster than higher. That is the whole selection rule. On a long delay day the order of preference is liquid carbohydrate first, then simple solids, then nothing that takes work to digest.

Sodium goes with the fluid, not separately. This is the point at which somebody usually recommends magnesium for the cramp that is coming. Do not bother. There are no controlled trials supporting magnesium for exercise-associated cramping, and the products marketed for it are selling a mechanism rather than a result. That argument is set out in full in the piece on cramping.

Caffeine is the one thing that needs planning rather than repeating. If you take it before a 1 pm start and walk on at 4:40, you have taken it at the wrong end of the delay. Hold it until the match before yours is in its final set. The cue is imprecise and still the best one available, and it beats dosing off a start time that has already moved twice.

The suspended match is a different problem

Rain, or a match carried over to the next day, means a restart, and the mistake is treating it as a longer delay.

If you come off at 5-5 in the second and go back on 90 minutes later, you have been sitting long enough to cool down and short enough that a real meal will still be in you. Treat it as a feed window, not a meal window: carbohydrate and fluid, nothing new, nothing heavy.

If the match resumes tomorrow, everything changes. You have played a match's worth of work and you have a full recovery window. Eat like you finished, then prepare like you are starting. Players get this wrong in the direction of caution, undereating on the night of a suspension because the match is not over. The match is over for today. Your muscles do not know it will be continued.

What this costs you to practise

Nothing, and it has to be practised anyway.

Nobody's stomach tolerates 4 consecutive gels the first time it meets them. Gut tolerance to carbohydrate during exercise improves with repeated exposure, which is a polite way of saying you find out what happens in training or you find out in a third set. Run the delay protocol in practice at least twice before a tournament where you might need it, including the version where you feed 4 times and never play.

The second thing worth practising is the version where you were wrong in the other direction. The match before yours ends in 50 minutes, you are on court in 20, and you have just eaten. It happens. The answer is that you play slightly full and it is uncomfortable and it is survivable, which is exactly why the anchor meal goes early rather than late.

What I would tell a club player

The same structure, smaller. Most club and junior tournaments run later than the draw sheet says, and the players affected worst are the ones with the least food with them.

Bring more than you think you need, in forms that keep. Do not eat the sandwich you brought because you are bored, which is the single most common error I see and it is not a nutrition error at all. Eat your anchor meal off the earliest possible start. Feed every hour after that. Take caffeine, if you take it, when the match in front of you is nearly finished.

And accept that you will occasionally get it wrong, because a delay is information you do not have. The structure is there so that being wrong costs you a slightly full stomach instead of a set.

Common questions

Educational material, not medical advice. Individual carbohydrate tolerance varies and any protocol should be tested in training before competition.